


[Meta] Red, Liz and Beauty and the Beast Myths, an Essay

by Figure_of_Dismay



Category: The Blacklist (TV)
Genre: Analysis, Beauty and the Beast myths, Essay, F/M, Fairy Tales, Folklore, Lizzington - Freeform, Meta, Other, Shipping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-13
Updated: 2015-07-13
Packaged: 2018-01-19 22:26:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1486360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Figure_of_Dismay/pseuds/Figure_of_Dismay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is an essay, not fic. A while back I remember saying that I was going to be writing a little bit about Beauty and the Beast stories and Red and Liz and the Lizzington ship. Since I needed to reconnect with the characters right now, I thought this would be a perfect opportunity. This is meta, not fiction. Assumes a Red/Liz pairing bias.<br/>[Now Added] -- a second piece of Red-centric meta, Red, Schrodinger's Daughter, and the Rusalka, on Red's destructive/self-destructive tendencies and my theory of why he may be so drawn to Liz.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I want to say that while I’ve read a lot of versions of the beauty and the beast tales, and have put years worth of thought in on this, I’ve had no formal training in interpretation and all my statements are simply my opinion. However I have put quite a lot of thought and days of work into this analysis and I would really appreciate if you would give it a chance, and tell me what you think.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [EDIT: this essay was written _before_ Berlin Parts 1 &2 aired and it does not take them into account. I do, however feel that Red's offer to leave and let Liz live her life in peace at the end of Berlin: Conclusion was genuine, and the true offer of release at his own expense that I hoped might come. The offer of dubious sincerity referred to in this essay is the "lines in the sand" exchange in 1.07. I debated editing it to reflect later developments but I think it better to let it stand as originally written.]
> 
> [EDIT AGAIN: I decided this winter to polish this up a bit and fully update this essay to be commensurate with the entirety of S1. I did not try to account for S2 actions. This is the final version of this essay. Original version posted on the 18 2014]

I’ve read and explored many iterations of the Beauty and the Beast myth, a tale that holds particular fascination for me. I’ve come to recognize that it’s a story that is echoed in many modern narratives, being so resonant and archetypal. The girl and her plight, the ritualized dinner, the taming of the Beast, the wildness of Beauty, all of these may be found lurking in many a drama. In this exploration I mean to elaborate on the profound parallel I see between Raymond, Liz and their narrative and this classic tale. There are two important character arcs accomplished in the Beauty and the Beast myth, first the transformation of the Beast, which is a fairly known concept, and second the transformation of Belle, which I feel is often overlooked. I feel that both are mirrored in the character arcs of Red and Liz.

First a little background. What is thought to be the earliest known version of French ‘La Belle et la Bete’ tale was a strange little novella written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve in the late 17th century, and in many respects was far different from the later, much shorten version put forth by Beaumont. Both contain the familiar details however, the rich merchant and his family fallen on hard times, exiled to the distant woods, the lovely youngest daughter who asks for only a rose, when in the height of summer it seems their fortunes have turned for the better, the father’s bumbling theft, the powerful Beast and his castle, the bargain between father and monster, Belle willingly turning herself over to the Beast in return for her father’s safety and family’s comfort. Such stories were born out of a time when most middle and upper class women had little say in their own marriage arrangements. Deals would be brokered among father’s and prospective husbands, and young women and girls felt a natural fear of what brute they might be bound to, and what he might demand she do.

Beauty and the Beast stories differ from the other animal/supernatural/enchanted bridegroom tales (folktale type 425c), they contain a certain combination of elements that set them apart. There is some dire or desperate situation to drive the plot, to drive the young heroine to leave her home voluntarily and coming to live in the Beast’s grand palace, and later some structure of interaction with the Beast, some nightly or daily ritual by which she comes to know him. There is also the regalness and power of the Beast, the lavishness and solitude of the life he offers Belle. While she is forbidden to return home or even leave his massive estate in many iterations, her every need is taken care of save that of companionship and she lives in the lap of luxury. In many of the tales Beauty takes dinner with the Beast every night, and in the simpler, child oriented versions, he asks for her hand in marriage, while in the original meant for adults, he asks to “sleep” with her.

The ritual of the meal is very important, and may be interpreted in many ways. As mentioned, on the surface it is a means of allowing them to grow acquainted. It also may represent the marriage bed, that congress with the strange new husband that the uninformed young brides of days past so feared, in the sense that eating may sometimes represent all pleasures of the flesh, though I believe that the nightly fine dinner represents only the intimacy of breaking bread together and the truce and discourse that represents. Lastly I believe the feast the Beast presents Belle is a symbol of how the Beast wishes to provide for Belle even when he cannot understand her distress, how he wishes to offer her comforts and care for her needs, how he wishes to assure her that she will not be neglected or mistreated in her time as his consort.

There is another tale, perhaps less well known called East of the Sun, West of the Moon, which has Scandinavian origins. In this tale, an enormous white bear who is a prince under a curse, is beguiled by the daughter of a peasant family and promises to provide wealth and comfort for the family -- which is on the brink of starvation before his intervention -- if the girl would go away with him. In this story the bear comes to sleep beside the girl every night in his human form, but she is forbidden to ever light her candle and look upon his face before their wedding day or a new more horrible stage of his curse will be set in motion. And of course, as it always happens in fairy tales, everyone who is told not to look, must look, and catastrophe befalls sending the girl on an arduous quest to rescue her Prince.

 

*

 

What does this all have to do with Red and Liz? Let us begin with Red, the Beast and his transformation.

Once he was an honorable man, with a loving family, and through devastating circumstance, what was done to him and what he has done to others, he has become a monster. When Liz accused him of this, he didn’t flinch from it or try to protest. He himself believes he is a monster or at least something monstrous, vicious, with a terrible appetite for vengeance. I don’t think we can blame Liz for her opinion here, Red certainly doesn’t. He knows what he is, he knows he is dangerous. He has brought Liz into his world and he intends to keep her, whatever his reasons or purposes may be.

But the classic tale, the transformation of the Beast isn’t something that happens only Belle’s eyes, a shift in perception as she grows accustomed to him. The Beast falls in love with the girl, whom he had believed useful to him in breaking his curse, chosen originally with likely a motive of self or convenience and nothing more. But the Beast comes to know Belle, in her strength and her kindness and her impatience with her captivity, and loves her honestly rather than what she might do for him. And when he sees himself reflected in her eyes he begins to wish he were not so monstrous. He wants to care for her and pamper her and ease her burdens, though it is largely he who has bound her to her burdens. He begins to feel shame at the wild shape of himself, and though he cannot curb his nature, he tries to keep Belle from seeing him at his most beastly, his most vicious, when he must spill blood and hunt and eat

In the 1946 movie by Jean Cocteau, which in my opinion is the definitive retelling of La Belle et La Bete, there is a remarkable scene where the Beast comes to Belle’s door fresh from the hunt, greatly disheveled and disarrayed and still covered with the blood of the doe he has slain, daring her to look upon the worst of him, hoping to receive her absolution or her pity or her revulsion or rebuke. Belle does not recoil, not disgusted nor any longer afraid but almost wearied for him, but is distressed at the state he’s in, and orders him to clean himself up and go to bed, and he retreats feeling Belle’s pure gaze is burning him. The Beast is overtaken by his huge frustrations that he must submit to the basest and most detestable parts of his nature, and he comes to look upon his Belle in this moment of weakness and feels his own reproach as much as hers, and her brusk concern is more than he can bear.

I liken this scene to the sequence when Red comes back from his rampage to rout out the mole and avenge Luli. He dresses himself in the fine clothes he usually wears but he cannot find his usual jovial human mask, he seems drained and sickened by the slaughter he has just performed and presents himself to the young woman he feels he has preserved from the worst aspects of his life and invites both her sympathy and her reproach. He would have no way of knowing at that point if she was aware of what he has been up to, and he went to her with the blood still metaphorically on his hands, not knowing what kind of welcome he could expect but went to her anyway, uncertain in the night, without waiting for a clearer head or the light of day.

Just as Belle became more dear and vital to the Beast, so too, Liz has become more and more real and precious to Red, not the phantom woman he seemed to think he knew but an actual person dear to him whom he truly respects. He tries to feed her, to entertain her, to comfort her, he arranges for time when they must interact within the bounds of their arrangement just as the Beast showers his Belle with gifts, and invites her to dine handsomely in his presence and tries to find a way to put her at ease. He tries to win her attention, and perhaps some of her compassion. He tries to become more human to her. Yet his insistence on her presence in his life is a large part of what has put her in this desperately difficult state, and he will not release her, even if it might be for her own good.

Likely Red had some idealized version of Lizzy that lived in his imagination — and I mean in the platonic sense of ideal, an abstract and perfectly tender woman who would easily do as he wished — just as the Beast pictured a perfect and idealized Belle who would come sweetly and easily to become his bride who would break his curse, that her innate goodness would facilitate his transformation without a thought. But they both wake to the reality of the women on whom they’ve pinned their hopes and to whom they’ve bestowed their devotion and find that they are faced with someone more complex and compelling, more challenging and less likely to be content with the confined role that was offered. And in coming to know and care for the real woman rather than the ideal, Red comes to realize his plans must change and his goals must change, and that he himself must become something she can trust, someone with whom she can sympathize, someone she can look at with more than forbearance and exasperation.

But it isn’t so simple. Wishing to be changed is not enough, he must accept within himself that he is a Beast, rather than only knowing that he appears beastly. He must face up to his actions and take them for what they are. He must empathize with Belle and see himself as she sees him without sulking with his ego and his vanity, or disavowing that he has been made this way by circumstance. And even though he cannot bend his beastly nature or cut it out altogether, he must find ways of restraint. He must not want to only appear more civilized before his Belle, but instead to act in ways that would let him stand with confidence before her and not fear the burn of her scrutiny. Only then has he begun the transformation back to a human man.

I think Red needs to see himself as Liz sees him, I think he needs her humanity and her sweetness, her stubbornness and her uncompromising pursuit to bring justice to the unjust. I think he needs to be willing to share of himself with her, let her see the depth and breadth of his corruption and his agonies. The honesty of his awful state is a part of what endears the Beast to Belle, seeing that he doesn’t act solely for the pleasure of fury, that in fact blood gives him little pleasure at all but that he acts out of necessity. Belle must become aware of how he is pinned between the Great Forces he commands and the Great Forces to which he is enslaved, only then can she begin to empathize with the creature to whom she has given her life.

In the tale he still wears a beast’s form at this point, but I believe this is when he begins his transformation. He loves the girl more than life itself and no monster can do that, a monster only caters to his own needs. He is a man already and only needs the catalyst of his sacrifice, his willing death, and Belle’s loving return to come and revive him in his true form. It is an unbearably human thing to seek and to find sympathy, to seek to know another’s mind and heart even if what is found there cannot be seen without flinching. And when he releases Belle back to comfort her family, even if it spells his damnation, this is proof of his real love.

One might say that Red coming out of the box during the Garrick incursion was such a sacrifice, but I can’t be satisfied that it was. Red was willing to sacrifice himself for her safety, yes, he would do the same if she was simply a necessary game piece to him. And once the way was again clear, he returned expecting to continue his original arrangement, Liz bound to their deal, and the cases they pursue like the nightly dinner with the Beast. Liz is still a part of his larger machinations, and she still ignorant of their extent or intent.

Even more aptly, after the first confrontation with Berlin and after Liz learned the truth of what happened to Sam (and I still can’t help thinking that that act was at Red’s hands but also at Sam’s bidding, knowing he was soon to be at the mercy of a painful, terminal disease, but that it was skewed in such a way to capitalize on the image of Red’s ‘monstrosity’ -- an argument for another day perhaps) there was Red’s offer to leave and let her live in peace.

Unlike an earlier, half-taunting offer that was delivered to make a point, this was meant completely in earnest. He would give her up, give up even the hope of her, if leaving her altogether was what she wished. It was the the pretence of a departure either, the devastation on his face when she accepted his offer to leave was too real, though he tried to hide it. He meant to release her entirely from their arrangement, back to her life or what was left of it, leaving aside all hope of however it was he’d expected her to help him, his way to a “second chance.” I believe this entirely fulfilled the narrative function of the Beast loving Belle and her happiness better than the possibility of salvation and releasing her back home to her family.

Even though, later, the structure remains in place, the ‘dinners’ of cases and enemies taken down, with no better accord or understanding is struck, that interaction stands as a satisfying resolution to what we may think of as the first chapter of a larger story. Perhaps later chapters will follow other archetypal patterns, but for the first, it was a denouement entirely in keeping the Beast and Belle.

 

*

 

We come now the second but equally important part of this analysis, Liz and Beauty and her own transformation from dutiful daughter to becoming a wild thing in her own right, and ruling partner to the Prince Who Was a Beast. I draw here from the Norwegian story of the Girl and the Bear more than the French Beauty and the Beast, though latter is still an important analogue.

Now, I could argue it both direction on whether or not Liz is a more willing or less willing participant than Belle or her Norse counterpart in her allegiance with the Beast. She was not offered even the option to volunteer herself as a sacrifice to the monster, instead she was plucked out her life will little recourse. But she is not held in the gilded l prison of the Beast’s castle and she is given far greater opportunity for refusal. After all, it would seem that -- to begin with -- only her job was at stake.

The Bear Prince promises that his chosen girl’s family will be handsomely provided for in return for her hand, for her accompanying him into the great and magical North. In the original, and most subsequent versions of La Belle et Bete, the Beast takes great considerations for Belle’s family to restore them to their former glory. You can see this aligned with Liz’s life in two ways. The first being the fact that Red had apparently been sending money to Sam, perhaps helping to provide for Liz or perhaps Sam was a part of his dealings, whatever they were.

The second way is less literal, but more intrinsic to Liz’s values, he is providing names and intel to the cause in return for her cooperation. It is an incentive it is impossible to refuse, even if she finds the alliance frightening and objectionable when they begin.

But after the initial culture shock, Belle, the Girl, they find their curiosity piqued by the strange and new and wonderous. It isn’t the comfort and the riches that capture her, if anything (when the tale takes the time to elaborate) the unending luxury bores her. It is the strangeness, the newness, the independence that catches her, and perhaps her profound power over the Beast.

Liz had never expected to be involved in such rough, violent and vital investigations, but it seems as though it hasn't taken her long to get hooked. Although she has protested at how it’s separated her from her cozy status quot, time and again she has prioritized the work. I don’t mean that as a criticism, in fact it is a mark in her favour that she wants to do what is hard and important rather than taking the easier path. Her natural and instinctive curiosity shines through. Liz has been repeatedly willing to risk herself for the good of the cause.

Like Beauty, Liz has faced great hardship in her life, loss of family, great endurance to make a life for herself, and yet she has also been relatively sheltered. For all the dark things Liz has investigated before, she hadn't faced anything that would shake or alter her deepest convictions. Liz has lived in a world that moves according to rules and morals that we know and recognize, and now she has been shown a wholly different, wild and unforgiving world.

In the Nordic tale, the girl who was to marry the Bear Prince is forbidden to look on the face of her fiance while he is in his human form. He sleeps every night beside her in their fine bed, but she is not to light her candle and look at him before they are safely married, or catastrophe will come. Our Liz has been put into a close relationship with Red, and he has asked her over and over to trust him, to not push or question him too closely just yet, for all of their sakes. He asks her not look, to be his companion in his monstrous form and also his company when he is most human, in the quiet and tender nights when she comes to talk to him at his various safe houses.

But the girl cannot help but break this prohibition. Of course she waits until the Prince sleeps and lights her candle, drips her tallow, sets events in motion. And Liz is a woman of determination and curiosity, of course she will not stop looking, questioning, making them both face down the most difficult truths, even if it will throw her life and Red’s plans into chaos and danger. And it is right that she push, the tale wouldn’t work without it.

After the girl breaks the rules, in many versions of East of the Sun West of the Moon, the Prince falls victim to his curse. The Girl then realizes that she loves her Bear Prince, and sets off on her arduous quest, following strange and cryptic clues to save him, and realizes she is far more able than she ever realized. It is always the threat that she will loose the Beast or the Bear forever that reveals to Belle and the Girl the depth of her feelings, before that she is unable to admit them. I can’t say if Red and Liz will follow these lines, but it would be a wonderful thing to see. If Red were in real danger, I think we know from episode 1.10, that she will go to great lengths to save him, that she cares for him far more than is called for simply by the bounds of their arrangement.

More than the proof of affection though, I want to see Liz tested and proven on a great quest, whether it be on Red’s behalf, or shared concerns or even her own ends. She has to realize her own capabilities, and her own ability to move within his world. Any relationship between them could only be successful or right or balanced if there were a more equal balance of power between them. Liz has to become aware of the power she holds over him -- in his world and her world. She has to become comfortable with her own strength and intuition and will.

One thing about Beauty and her counterparts that is often overlooked, is Beauty’s own yearning, her own wildness. I think the reason these tales still resonates so strongly with so many modern girls and women, in a relatively modern world where they don’t face the fear being sold into marriage, is the actualization of Beauty’s power and agency. Belle is chosen and Belle chooses herself. She is special in a way that all girls hope to be special, she is meant for a terrifying and wonderful fate. As much as the Beast begins to seek his own humanity in the eyes of his Belle, Beauty begins to see wildness and strangeness in the Beast that she recognizes in herself -- and that she wishes to emulate or achieve in herself.

When Beauty returns to the bosom of her family, she finds she no longer fits in among them and their mundane concerns. And more than that, she finds that her family is nervous of her, they see the touch or taint of the beast upon her, think they smell a hint of his magic. But they’re wrong, it’s not anything the Beast has done, Beauty has changed because she has grown and no longer fits in the space she left.

Liz’s life is altered as well, and not just her life but her outlook. Her husband, such as he was, noticed the change, and her colleagues are often suspicious of the depth of her connection to Red. But Liz is getting stronger, and she’s realizing that everyone involved has their own agendas, even herself. She’s learning to look out for herself, not just to toe the party line, not to follow without question.

She’s realizing that Red’s opinion does seem to matter to her, whether she likes it or not. She’s moving forward out of the controlled and expected role she once played towards being something more cunning and vibrant. She is starting to want to prove her independence and wildness to both herself and Red.

 

*

 

Of course there is more to Red and Liz’s story than just what can be summed up with fairy tales, but these old stories linger for a reason. The speak to certain instinctual patterns. They suggest a capricious kind of fate in charge of events magical and deadly. They express certain primal hopes and yearnings.

The Beauty and the Beast is a tale that combines the redemptive arc of a vicious creature who is transformed — not by the naive and wholesome care of the innocent girl, but by loving a vital and human woman and confronting his demons and striving to be lovable in her eyes — and the arc of a long suffering young woman who takes up her own agency, learns to recognize and accept what she desires and how to go after them — that she is capable of choosing upon whom she bestows her love — and finds that she is her powerful Beast’s equal in every way.

You have to admit you can recognize many of these elements from the old tales in the narrative l of Red and Liz. The "Lizzington" relationship is a Beauty and the Beast story. I hope we can see many fan works exploring these connections, the dynamic between our heroes and how they might play out along these lines. And if events unfold according to these patterns, between Red and Liz and the larger machinations of the mytharc, then I believe the natures of the characters and their archetypes would be well honored -- and we would be very lucky indeed to watch it play out.


	2. Red, Schrodinger's Daughter, and the Rusalka

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My second major piece of meta for TBL fandom. An analysis of Red's character and what may have drawn him to Liz. Lizzington pairing bias.

This is something I've been ruminating on in the back of my mind for a while now. I’ve been trying to understand certain apparent-contradictions in Red's character, but it finally occurred to me that they aren't really contradictions at all.

Raymond Reddington has been through incredible trauma and loss. While we may not know a lot of the surrounding details we do know that he discovered this loss in an incredibly visceral way, and that he ended up on the run -- for reasons that are as yet unclear -- immediately afterwards. This means that he was not allowed a normal space of time to cope and process, and may still have some of this initial reaction compartmentalized somewhere in some locked corner of his mind. He would have had no chance to seek therapeutic help or learn appropriate coping strategies for his grief and shock.

He is a man living off his anger, and yet profound, sustained anger is often a masking emotion for other things, like guilt. I am almost certain that Raymond sees himself as directly culpable for the fate of his family. I think he believes that his actions somehow lead directly to their deaths, or disappearance. Grief is an incredible weight but it is healthy and natural as long as the bearer doesn’t cling to it as a crutch, but grief charged by guilt is like poison, it can be endless, it can be paralytic.

We must also not forget that guilt involves the ego. The person who feels guilt over an act that they didn’t commit or order to be committed is a person who believes their impact is large enough to cause a whole chain of events, and that those events are personally directed at them. While this is more than likely true in Red’s case, it makes the weight of his guilt and grief especially profound because of the small nagging sensation of personal slight. This is a potent combination.

There is also the conundrum of what I respectfully call Schrodinger’s Daughter. Schrodinger’s thought experiment was meant to express how absurd he found the emerging quantum theory that proposed that subatomic particles may exist in more than one state or location when not influenced by the act of observation, and as monstrously absurd as it seems, the supposition stands, a subatomic particle is only more likely to be in one place than anywhere else and only the act of observing it pins it in place. So to our anti-hero’s poor lost daughter. I believe that to Red she is always both living and dead. He knows she is likely to be dead, there is no rational hope, and the life she may have lived if she had been spared could as well be terrible to contemplate. But he does not know absolutely. There was blood, but there was no terrible, sad little body to bury and put to rest, so for him, even as he grieves her death, she still lives by the fact of his unknowingness. Red’s grief also is not dead, but living, perpetuated by all that he does not know. And that perpetual, distorted hope, and fear, drives him on and on.

Red has lived for a long time in the dark, in destructive spirals. He has built his empire, is trying to launch his campaign and does what he needs to to protect his assets, his life and livelihood. He is in my opinion, at time acclimatized and deadened to the nature of his world, and at other times horrified by it, seeing himself at a remove from his own situation.  
He lives a life of such his stimulus at all times, fear, danger, wonder, pleasure, that he becomes inured to these as the norm and has developed a pattern of seeking new sensations, new dangers, new experiences, whatever the cost to feel himself awake and alive, to feel pleasure and excitement.

But the opposite side of that coin is the fact that he seeks pleasures that will cost him. He seeks rewards that will put him in danger. And these risks are just as much his aim as the potential benefits to him.

The water nymph, the naiad, the rusalka, the Siren, these beautiful and deadly creatures show up in many different mythologies. Mysterious, immortal or magical, appearing as young women swimming and sunning in the water or cavorting at the water's edge. They are beautiful and deadly and irresistible. They sing and dance and tantalize and enchant men to follow them to their deaths under the water, either out of true malice or out of a lack of understanding that mere mortals need the air to live.

After Red told his story about getting stung and nearly drowning and being rescued from the water by a beautiful woman, a miraculous coincidence, as if she were a spirit of the water who appeared at just in time to save him. And that miraculous rescue started me thinking about the reverse, about all of Red’s close calls and his terrible risks and his strange adventures and his stories of reckless drug use. It made me wonder if there was more to it than seeking more and more outrageous experiences to offset an already outrageous and brutal life.

How many times has he followed sirens to the waters edge, knowing full well it could be his doom, willing to embrace whatever fate may befall him? These sirens may be rather literally, dangerous women, or at least women of uncertain loyalties, or high risk deal, that he walks into alone, or experimental substances, or, the ultimate siren call, his quest, the tantalizing hint of information about his family and what was done to them and by whose hand.

I believe he is subconsciously driven to seek punishment, not only for his initial perceived offence of having caused the death or destruction of his family, but for the subsequent direct violence he has committed -- and perhaps more crucially, the pleasure he has let himself experience since his initial fall.

He may be “reckless to the point of suicidal” as Cooper said, but not with any wish to die, he wants to live and experience and fight his war. But at the same time he can’t help holding his hand into the flame over and over to see if it still burns.

And in this context, Elizabeth Keen is not such an anomaly after all. She need not be tied to him by any filial duty or any great and binding promise, she need only to have become gradually important to him through a series of events and connections. The absurd proportions of his involvement in her life, is interest in her, his willingness to sacrifice everything for her, when viewed in the context of the rest of his life, these all seem far less surprising or significant. They may not speak to a great love or even great affection -- to begin with, at the very first -- but to the way he lives his life, chasing phantoms and following the promise of pleasure and pain.  
She is a combination of all the things that draw him in, a vital piece in a high risk play that may bring him great reward, in all likelihood a good deed he has come to care for -- and a beautiful vibrant woman, who if she understood her power over him, could annihilate him completely if she wanted to. She is, in fact, the most brilliant and most dangerous Siren he’s ever met.

And I believe that the reason for his initial profound fascination is as simple as that.

But what really gets me is how the story shifts. He’s gone from being a mesmerized sailor who seemed ready to dash himself on the rocks for her, yet with no clear concept of who Liz really is, only his idealized vision of her, to real affection. To being willing to go at her word, not as a test or a taunt but in actuality. To wishing she might find all the love and care she deserves. To being willing to let her deal with Tom how she liked rather than pursue him personally as a lead to Berlin.

And the real development I want to see between them is whether or not Red will allow Liz to see the extent of his compulsion, and the pains and hopes that drive him.

I don’t just want to see Liz gain sympathy for Red, but to have her see and understand the destructiveness of his patterns, his guilt, his anger, his soldiering. I want her to love him enough to tell him she sees what he’s doing and ask him to stop.

I don’t just want to see them ride off into the sunset, or for Red to whisk our Liz away from her life of misery, but for him to love her enough to let go of his poisons and Sirens and his past. I want him to love her so much he is willing to be selfless enough to give up his guilt and his holding his hand into the flame.

I want him to realize he doesn't love his pain half so much as he loves her. That is the redemptive arc, that is the love story I want to see.


End file.
